This exhibition held by the Cadbury Research Library: Special Collections at the University of Birmingham included material from the archives of the Church Missionary Society held there, and some of its rare book collections. The accompanying information boards are featured here. The exhibition focused on the role of religion in the abolitionist movement, the power of the African voice in literature, and the role played by Birmingham residents in the anti-slavery campaigns. A booklist on anti-slavery publications held at the library was also produced. The exhibition was part of a University-wide initiative, with additional involvement from academic departments and the Guild of Students. An online exhibition was also produced in collaboration with the Library of the Religious Society of Friends: 'Quakers and the path to abolition in Britain and the colonies'.

Bishop’s Stortford was the birthplace of the Victorian financier and imperialist Cecil Rhodes. To commemorate the bicentenary of the Abolition Act, Bishop's Stortford Museum and Rhodes Art Complex explored Britain’s imperial ambitions in the ‘Coveting Africa’ exhibition. The museum holds much material from Southern Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Botswana: areas where British colonialism and imperialism in Africa was focused in the nineteenth century. Through a year-long programme of arts events, this project discussed the relationship between Britain and Africa, and explored British attitudes to African peoples. Events included workshops by the London School of Capoeira.

The Adisa project gave a group of 20 young people of African and African Caribbean heritage the chance to investigate their roots both in Bristol and Africa. The group researched the history and legacies of Bristol's involvement in the trade in enslaved Africans, and its impact on one African country: Ghana. This was a community partnership project in collaboration with the Bread Youth Project, Full Circle Youth and Family and the Mill Youth Centre. The group opened their own exhibition, 'Afrikan Footsteps' at the City Museum and Art Gallery, after a two-week research trip to Ghana to learn about the country's history and culture. The exhibition included short films made by the participants; a Quotes Wall, taken from young people’s interviews with members of their local community; a wall of their personal heroes; a photographic exhibition of their trip; and 'Ma’afa Journey', a film recording their personal reactions to places visited in Ghana.

Breaking the Chains opened at the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum to coincide with the bicentenary, and told the story of the British transatlantic slave trade and its abolition. Developed in partnership with Bristol City Council's Museums, Galleries and Archives' Service, the exhibition used artefacts, film and testimony to challenge perceptions about Britain's involvement in the slave trade and its legacy today. It featured a multimedia gallery of digital memories and feelings on the contemporary legacies of the slave trade; interactive sound stations to see and hear personal testimonies and the power of black music; and the ‘Me deya’ gallery, led by Firstborn Creatives, a collection of work from artists and communities who wished to share their creative pieces about the legacies of the slave trade. Associated events included African music for children, community dance events and public debates.

Port City was a large-scale exhibition featuring over 40 international artists and addressing issues of migration, trade and contemporary slavery. Set in the arts centre and gallery Arnolfini, it was accompanied by a programme of art, music, film, literature and educational activities. Coinciding with the bicentenary year, several works explored Bristol's histories of trade, as well as a contemporary port. For Seeds of Change, Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves researched sites around the Floating Harbour where ballast would have been off-loaded. The ballast seeds discovered were germinated by local groups so as to make a garden of ‘living history’, reflecting the different routes travelled by Bristol merchants. Other highlights included a model of a 'global village' made from sugar by Meschac Gaba and kaleidoscopes showing contemporary scenes from the triangle of the transatlantic slave trade by Mary Evans.

As part of the Abolition 200 programme, the Bristol 1807 project set out to explore the lives of ordinary Bristolians in 1807. An exhibition in the Central Library, and a series of touring exhibitions in Bristol's libraries and community centres explored society, culture, trade and travel in 19th century Bristol, a city and port with many ties to transatlantic slavery. The project collaborated with local schools to provide creative art workshops for children around themes of slavery and freedom. There were also 'Treasures in Store' hands-on sessions with rare library artefacts concerned with the period of abolition including books, newspapers and everyday objects. A book emerging from the project, 'Bristol in 1807: Impressions of the City at the Time of Abolition' by Anthony Beeson, was published in 2009.

Remembering Slavery 2007 was a regional initiative involving museums, galleries and other cultural organisations across the North East of England in a programme of exhibitions, events, performances, lectures and activities to explore the themes of slavery and abolition.

As part of the initiative, the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle exhibited art objects from its collection, which traced the European demand for luxury goods linked to the system of plantation slavery, such as tobacco, sugar and indigo. For example, the exhibition included a number of sugar moulds and designs, alongside tobacco graters and tins. The recently conserved 'Girl with a Dog' by Philip Vilain (c. 1708) was also on display; the painting features a black servant faded into the background, revealing of eighteenth-century British society's racial divisions.

DEED (Development Education in Dorset) works within the community to develop understanding of global education and cultural diversity. The charity produced and made available to hire the Dorset's Hidden Histories touring exhibition, which explored 400 years of the stories of people with African and Caribbean heritage across Dorset, Bournemouth and Poole. Many Dorset families were involved in slavery, either owning or trading in African slaves, and Black people were brought to Dorset by slave traders to live as servants in the large country houses. The exhibition, which is still available to borrow, also includes details of African American GIs on Poole Quay, a freed enslaved American living in Bournemouth, and Belle Davis, the African-American singer and dancer who performed in Weymouth in 1917. The organisation worked with Louisa Adjoa Parker, a local poet and black history researcher, to provide creative writing workshops to explore the exhibition. An accompanying booklet, written by Parker, can be purchased from DEED.

Bury Archives and Museum collaborated on an exhibition based on the journals, letters and other papers of John Hutchinson. The Hutchinson family's cotton spinning business had links to slavery in the United States: in 1848, John Hutchinson travelled to America to buy cotton produced by slaves. The exhibition at Bury Art Gallery featured archives, museum objects and paintings that put the papers into a social context. Cotton Threads went on tour to branch libraries, where talks and family workshops explored family histories and the cotton business. Volunteers assisted in conserving, cataloguing and digitising the Hutchinson papers, which were made available online. Primary school pupils took part in workshops held in the exhibition and a resource pack for secondary schools was produced with local teachers (available to download from the Cotton Threads website).

Cambridge University Library held a small exhibition in 2007 showcasing its collections of rare books and manuscripts relating to slavery and abolition. These include records of the Greg family, who owned a sugar plantation in Dominica, and documents relating to slave compensation for the West India colonies. Other records held by the library relate to British Quakers, the abolition campaign, and the persistence of slavery in the 20th century and into the present day.

This project was a collaboration between the Dales Countryside Museum in Hawes and North Yorkshire Record Office to research people and places of the Yorkshire Dales connected with Africa, the Caribbean and India. 'Hidden History' collected local stories of slave owners and traders, abolitionists, Africans and Asians who moved to the Dales, and others like the actor Ira Aldridge who passed through. The project included various community activities. Working with actor Joe Williams, pupils from the Wensleydale School explored the life of Olaudah Equiano and performed alongside Joe at the exhibition opening. There were drop-in sessions on exploring family history, carnival costume making, talks and music. The exhibition toured to other locations in Yorkshire, including Boroughbridge Library. The Dales Countryside Museum has continued to collect information relating to individuals who were connected with the Yorkshire Dales and the wider world.

This exhibition and booklet were produced as part of South Gloucestershire's Engage 2007 project, in partnership with Yate and District Heritage Centre. Both the exhibition and booklet explored local connections with the history of slavery and anti-slavery in South Gloucestershire. Links identified included the career of Robert Jenkinson of Hawkesbury (later Prime Minister Lord Liverpool), the Caribbean plantations of the Codrington family, the campaign efforts of abolitionist Joseph Sturge and, looking further back in history, St Wulfstan's attempts to abolish the trade in slaves to Ireland in the 11th century. The booklet was written and edited by Lorna Brooks and David Hardill. The exhibition toured the local area, including Thornbury and District Museum, pictured here.

Lancaster was the UK's fourth largest slaving port at the height of the transatlantic slave trade in the 18th century. Lancashire Museums worked with a range of partners to raise awareness of this largely hidden history - first from 2002 through STAMP (the Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project), and in 2007 through Abolished? This bicentenary project consisted of exhibitions, creative writing, radio broadcasts, and schools projects, one of which produced a Slavery Town Trail that explored some of the buildings made possible by the wealth the slave trade brought to Lancaster. At the heart of the project were commissioned installations and interventions by artists Lubaina Himid ('Swallow Hard: The Lancaster Dinner Service' at the Judge's Lodgings) and Sue Flowers ('One Tenth' at Lancaster Maritime Museum). Both were accompanied by outreach programmes and workshops with local schools. A touring exhibition was produced in partnership with Anti-Slavery International and Lancashire County Council Youth and Community, which looked at transatlantic slavery and modern day slavery. The exhibition toured throughout Lancashire.

Leeds-born businessman Richard Oastler was a leading figure in the 19th century campaign to end child slavery in the factories and mills of Yorkshire. The University of Huddersfield Archives, West Yorkshire Archives, Huddersfield Local History Library and Kirklees Museums and Galleries hold significant sources relating to the Huddersfield centred campaign against 'Yorkshire Slavery'. This project devised an exhibition ('The Past and Present of the Slave Trade') and heritage trail, and ran workshops for school children, local societies and youth theatres. A conference was held, and the University of Huddersfield Press later published John A. Hargreaves and E. A. Hilary Haigh, 'Slavery in Yorkshire: Richard Oastler and the campaign against child labour in the Industrial Revolution' (2012).

Inspired by the bicentenary, the Distorted Image exhibition at Hereford Cathedral explored how distorted perceptions throughout history have resulted in prejudice, discrimination and enslavement. Incomplete or misleading images of human beings, who are black or female or in some way considered 'other', have resulted in unjust behaviour against them, particularly in the case of restricted legal and political rights. Alongside the example of slavery, this exhibition also looked at the invariably inferior position of women within church teaching. Distorted Image was part of the ongoing Mappa Mundi and Chained Library exhibition. The Hereford Mappa Mundi is a 13th century map featuring drawings of the history of humankind and the natural world, which records how medieval scholars interpreted the world in spiritual as well as geographical terms.

A touring exhibition from Herefordshire Museums, which explored Herefordshire's hidden history of slavery. Local connections include Moccas Court near Hereford, the country house once home to the Cornewall family, owners of a sugar plantation on Grenada at the time of the Grenadian uprising of 1795. Another county connection to the history of slavery is Lady Hawkins' School in Kington, the construction of which was bequeathed in 1632 by the widow of Sir John Hawkins, England's first slave trader. The nineteenth-century poet and abolitionist Elizabeth Barrett Browning also had family connections in Herefordshire. The exhibition was taken on tour around Herefordshire and Warwickshire on a specially commissioned Abolition Bus.

In collaboration with the Peterborough branch of the African Caribbean Forum, Peterborough Museum hosted 'Beyond the Bicentennial, 1788-1838: Exploring 50 Years of the Slave Trade'. The exhibition's focus was the fifty years leading up to the end of slavery in the British Empire, 1833. It highlighted museum objects and local connections to the era of abolition, including black communities in Peterborough and links between slave-produced sugar and the rise of tea drinking in Georgian Britain. Two special event days included Georgian period re-enactors, historical talks on slavery, African drumming workshops, African food tasting and community displays.

George John Scipio Africanus (1763-1834) was Nottingham's first recorded black entrepreneur, starting an employment agency called the 'Africanus Register of Servants'. As a child, Africanus was brought to England from Sierra Leone and given as a present to wealthy Wolverhampton businessman Benjamin Molineux. He then moved to Nottingham and became a freeholder. Nottinghamshire Archives and MLA East Midlands produced web resources for teachers and learners based on the life of George Africanus. An exhibition toured venues around the city, including Nottingham Council House and Brewhouse Yard. On 25 March 2007, as part of the bicentenary events in Nottingham, a service was held at St Mary's Church led by the Bishop of Kingston (Jamaica), the Rt Revd Robert Thompson. A new memorial stone was dedicated to Africanus, and a plaque unveiled commemorating his life.

Myrtilla’s Trail was developed at Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum in partnership with poet Brenda Tai Layton, using objects, images and texts to explore local links with the slave trade. Myrtilla, 'Negro slave to Mr Tho. Beauchamp', is buried in the village of Oxhill in Warwickshire. Apart from her gravestone (dated 1705), she remains anonymous. Warwick District has connections with slave owners, such as the Greatheed family of Guy's Cliffe, sugar plantation owners in St Christopher (St Kitts). This trail around the galleries offered a starting point for exploring these complex and often hidden histories, including busts and documents of the Greatheed family, abolitionist coins, protest songs, and travel posters.

This exhibition at the Museum of Edinburgh explored the city's links to the slave trade and, in particular, trading connections with the Americas. Imports to the Port of Leith from North America and the West Indies included tobacco, rum, sugar, cotton, rice and indigo. The exhibition looked at Scots who sought fortunes in the West Indies, as well as Black residents who made their homes in Edinburgh. It also explored Edinburgh's connections to the abolition movement.